ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the assumption that both the epistemology and the metaphysical context for science need to be rethought on a naturalist platform that departs strongly from Kant's ‘critical philosophy’ as well as from the positivism and reductionist physicalism that has succeeded it. Strikingly, we may find common ground in such an endeavor with elements of post-Kantian German Naturphilosophie. I would like to recover the philosophy of nature that was elaborated from Spinoza to German Idealism in terms of a principle of immanent spontaneity (conatus, or, in more recent terms, self-organization and emergence) and which I wish to call, following Spinoza, natura naturans. This chapter aims to locate a crucial moment of struggle for the liberation of imagination in both philosophy of nature and the practice of empirical science: that which pivots on the challenge to Kant's philosophy of science made by Friedrich Schelling in his 1798 work, Von der Weltseele.
